Science Friday for Friday, November 15, 2013

In Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, New York Times columnist and reporter Nick Bilton tells of the backstabbing, booze, and tears behind the 140-character social network's rise from struggling start-up to $25 billion company.

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Did you know that most mammals, from a house cat to an elephant, take roughly the same amount of time to urinate? Researchers at Georgia Tech collected data from real-life and online video streams, and discovered that a combination of physiology and gravity enable this feat of fluid dynamics.

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One in every five sunlike stars in the Milky Way may have an Earth-sized planet circling it in the Goldilocks zone--the sweet spot where liquid water could exist. That's according to a new analysis of data from the Kepler spacecraft. Sara Seager, an exoplanet hunter at MIT, talks about what's next in the hunt for Earth 2.0.

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In Falling Upwards, writer Richard Holmes tells the story of early balloon flight--and of the nervy scientists who risked life and limb to take their experiments into the air. Among their discoveries? Insect migration and the stratosphere. Falling Upwards chronicles the balloonists who took science into the stratosphere.

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PayPal, Chase Quickpay, Venmo: all ways to transfer money quickly to your friends. But none is as simple as sending an e-mail. Enter Square Cash--a new service from the mobile-payments company Square. But should it be this easy? Ellis Hamburger, a reporter at The Verge, debates the pros and cons in this episode of App Chat.